It was late on a Tuesday in September last year when one of his young client service team handed him the daily transaction report and said: ''Boss, you better take a look at this.''

Mr Kerr’s team had noticed one of their clients, National Australia Bank associate director Lukas Kamay, was making sizable bets on the Australian dollar, minutes and sometimes seconds before the announcement of significant economic news. Mr Kerr, the founder and owner of Pepperstone Financial, looked up Kamay’s profile via his gold LinkedIn account and found he was friends with an Australia Bureau of Statistics employee Christopher Hill through Monash University. “That was when it suddenly clicked that this guy was only trading ABS data and had a man on the inside,” Kerr told Fairfax Media from his Gippsland farm on Sunday.

Years ago, connecting the dots for investigators was hard. It required lots of guys sitting around with index cards, cross-referencing names and schools and places of birth. They were lucky to catch anyone. Now? They just look you up on LinkedIn.